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Description:

Christopher Bryant was born in 1936 at Hampstead, North London. His father was a classically trained pianist who had, during the Great Depression, formed a small band, The Paragon Players, which performed at various venues in North London. His daytime job was demonstrating pianos for Maples and Co, Tottenham Court Road, London. As World War Two approached, however, he joined the London Fire Brigade and, by the end of the war, rose to be a Senior Fire Controller for North London. After the war, his father rejoined Maples as an Estimator and Interior Designer. He never played professionally again. Belatedly, but happily, Chris’s sister Jocelyn arrived in the family in 1953.
Chris attended private schools at Buckingham College, Harrow, and Haberdashers’ Aske’s, Hampstead. In later life, he wondered how his parents, of modest means, could afford the fees. Later, his father’s memoirs made it clear. Maples, one of the old family companies set up in the early 19th century, had a policy of educating its employees’ children to encourage staff loyalty. If the child could win a place in a school, the company would pay the fees, together with a small allowance for uniforms.
Despite Chris’s considerable talents as a scholar in secondary school, failure in Latin precluded him from seeking entry to Cambridge or Oxford. Happily, his later career appears not to have been disadvantaged by this. In 1955 Chris gained a County Award to Kings College London, where he graduated BSc with Honours in Zoology in 1958. In the same year, with a DSIR studentship, he enrolled for a PhD with Jim Danielli, the noted membrane biochemist. As a preliminary, Chris completed an MSc at University College London. He returned to King’s but was so disenchanted with his research topic and conditions that in 1960 he transferred to King’s College Hospital to work on the effects of anti-inflammatory drugs (such as aspirin) on subcellular metabolism in animal tissues, supervised by Mervyn Smith.